Reimagining Iowa’s Underground Railroad

“Memorial, John Brown,” oil on wood panel, 11” x 14”. The site of the Maxon house, where John Brown trained eleven men for his famous 1859 attack on West Virginia’s Harpers Ferry. “Only the tree and a nearby feedlot remains in this expansive, empty landscape.”

If you’ve ever passed through Iowa, you’ve experienced the flat stretches of highway that run through the vast prairies and farms blanketing the Midwest. Like most American states, Iowa can seem, at times, like a caricature of itself: corn, state fairs, hog farms, tornados, and whatever else filters up into the news each election cycle. We think we know a place because we get what it’s about. But time, and what gets swept up with its passing, can make a place more complicated than you think. Which is why it can be surprising to learn about Iowa’s history with the Underground Railroad in the years leading up to the Civil War.

It’s not easy to see the Underground Railroad in Iowa today. (Though there is a strong preservation effort in the state, it would be easier to find railroad remnants in, say, parts of New England.) What remains are empty prairies, old barns no longer in use, homes that have moved, or foundations from which they’ve been torn down. But, of course, it wasn’t easy to see then, either. The name was a generous metaphor. The journey out of slave-holding states was treacherous, and voyagers relied on a loose network of homes and trails.

Iowa was an adolescent state when the Civil War broke out, in 1861. It joined the union in 1846, and was populated with farming settlers from both Northern and Southern states. But the tumultuous political climate eventually made Iowa pro-Lincoln. Iowa provided shelter to the radical abolitionist John Brown, who crossed the state several times on his way to and from Kansas; his acts of violence ignited the abolitionist movement and aggressively antagonized the security of the South. Iowa was a frontier, and aside from being the most Western free state at the time—and thus a crucial destination for slaves being moved out to Missouri—it marked a new frontier in the nation’s consciousness. But, as settlers moved further and further West, Iowa became what it is today: the middle. Here’s a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Gilead,” which is set in the western corner of Iowa:

We became like the people without the Law, people who didn’t know their right hand from their left. Just stranded here. A stranger might ask why there is a town here at all. Our own children might ask. And who could answer them? It was just a dogged little outpost in the sand hills, within striking distance of Kansas. That’s really all it was meant to be. It was a place John Brown and Jim Lane could fall back on when they needed to heal and rest. There must have been a hundred towns like it, set up in the heat of an old urgency that is all forgotten now, and their littleness and their shabbiness, which was the measure of the courage and passion that went into the making of them, now just look awkward and provincial and ridiculous, even to the people who have lived here long enough to know better.

When I was last out in Iowa, where I lived for two years as a graduate student, in Iowa City, I visited a town called West Branch. It happens to be the birthplace of President Herbert Hoover, as well as a well-documented stop on the Underground Railroad. I was there, in May, with a former classmate—a painter and writer named Ben Shattuck, who had begun visiting West Branch to see an old Quaker Meeting House.

On one of these visits, he stumbled upon a map of eastern Iowa’s Underground Railroad. Quaker farmers in Iowa had, Shattuck learned, “outfitted their houses with crawl spaces, tunnels leading away from cellars, and, in one case, an entire floor that lifted to reveal a stairway down to secret room.” The risk was significant, if not as great as that to the runaways themselves. “For helping escaped slaves, these farmers were sued, shot at, and sent death threats. In 1850, a Missouri man sued a group of Salem, Iowa, farmers for ten thousand dollars when the Iowans aided nine slaves who had escaped from a farm in Clark County, Missouri. The case went to federal court. The Iowans were found guilty and ordered to pay the value of the missing slaves,” Shattuck said.

“For a while I tried to find some of the sites, but couldn’t. Then, with the old land records, I realized that I couldn’t find the sites because they were gone,” he said. “Twenty miles north of the Missouri border, I visited what used to be an important stop for fugitive slaves only to discover the house had been cleared to make way for a little league field. Not trace of the house, or the tunnel leading from its cellar to a secret room, remained.”

Shattuck worked with Sandra Harmel, a local historian, and slowly, over the course of year, began to unearth locations that were once recorded or mentioned as having been part of the Underground Railroad. What has emerged is a series of his paintings, which Shattuck is calling “The Passage,” and which will open this Saturday at The Harrison Gallery, in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

All paintings by Ben Shattuck.

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